Iger: Apple CEO Steve Jobs is 'a Tremendous Sounding Board'

Disney CEO Bob Iger also addressed his relationship with Apple CEO Steve Jobs during his question-and-answer session with analysts on Tuesday, saying: "He has been to two board meetings, and he has already been a great contributor as a board member. For me, he has become a tremendous sounding board."

He added: "The opportunity to talk to Steve Jobs about new media opportunities versus go to Apple and spend the day with his team to see iTV or the next generation iPods or talk about the iTunes customer and the experience they have with the customer movie download, TV download, music download, it is a great, great opportunity for me and for the company. So he has become very quickly not only a great sounding board but a great adviser and someone that I can turn to readily for advice in a lot of these areas. And I think weire lucky to have him."

As for favoring Apple technology over another companyis simply because Mr. Jobs sits on Disneyis board and is its largest shareholder, Mr. Iger said: "First of all we do take a platform agnostic approach to deal with Apple is not exclusive, under any circumstance contractually or otherwise. And certainly Steve Jobs understands that as a major shareholder of Disney. We are choosy in terms of the partners that we pick because we have to have a pretty good digital rights management solution.

"We have to believe that the platform is going to work. We really believe that our content should be in a platform that we have confidence in. And that means it is user-friendly, it is well marketed, it is well-financed, it is well-organized. And we also believe that it has to provide us with enough compelling other reasons to put it on, meaning it is going to generate not just usage but some form of incremental revenue."